Taking the stage at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, Dana White start your introduction Donald Trump with an explanation. “Nobody tells me what to say,” he said, “and I’m not anybody’s puppet.” Buzzing with enthusiasm and pointing to the audience, he had come to Milwaukee to play the role of hype man, and to vouch for Trump’s honesty.
“I’m in the tough guy business,” White continued, “and this guy is the toughest, most resilient guy I’ve ever met in my life.”
The pair—the UFC CEO and the Republican presidential candidate—are familiar. Their friendship dates back to the 1990s, when Atlantic City’s Trump Taj Mahal hosted a sport that was largely considered too violent for the mainstream. As their relationship deepened, each continued to grow in stature and influence. By 2016, when White spoke at the Republican National Convention for the first of three times, he presided over a full empire that had overseen a $4 billion acquisition. In June, shortly after Trump sentenced During the hush money trial, his first public appearance after the crime was at a UFC fight.
Even by Trump’s contemporary standards, the former president recently had a new license to declare himself an outlaw. “A lot of people said it was the most iconic photo they’d ever seen,” he said. speak the New York Post Office on Sunday, the day after the assassination attempt, as he reflected on an instantly indelible image — fists raised, ears bleeding. Some conference attendees this week wore ear bands in homage to their leader, reflecting the enthusiasm on display among a wide range of macho enthusiasts. 50 cents, whose early rise was fueled by his own shooting survival, gleefully posted images of Trump’s face plastered on the cover of his debut album. “If it wasn’t obvious enough who God wanted to win,” Jake Paul wrote on X. And White, appearing on ESPN this week, and always acting as a veteran politician for the Trump online sports network with a large young following, put the issue most clearly.
“This guy is the coolest, most authentic American of all time,” he said. Pat McAfee.
On stage Thursday, White, speaking shortly afterward, Hulk Hogan and a performance of Kids RockIt was mostly the same tune for five minutes. “I knew I was going to choose real American leadership,” he said loudly, “and a real American badass.” He wore his signature dark suit and open white shirt, his shaved head glistening under the lights of the RNC. Earlier in the day, as he flew from Italy to Milwaukee to show off his vitality, he wrote on Instagram that he had “fasted for another 19 hours.”
Since Trump’s election, White has continued to grow his fame and financial clout. He launched Power Slap, a slapping competition that, like the UFC before it, has been widely condemned as too disgusting to continue. Tickets to a UFC fight at The Sphere in Las Vegas in September are expected to be among the most expensive in history. At a rally in Georgia in March, hours after attending a UFC fight in Miami, Trump praised his friend’s success, joking that he hoped White “didn’t run against me.”
In the model of masculinity that White extolled Thursday, the former and future president would be a worthy counterweight to his own independent streak. But at this point in the two men’s long and symbiotic relationship, he hardly feels the need to explain why.
“I don’t tell you what to think,” White told the eager crowd. “I tell you what I know.”
